Ivan Massow, "the only gay in the Westminster Village", talks to Harry
Wallop about why the Gay Marriage Bill is so important for the Tory
Party, and why his local Conservative Association refuses to pick him as a
prospective MP.

Today the Marriage (Same Sex) Bill has its second reading in the Commons. For some Tories, most notably the prime minister, this an essential piece of legislation, a final confirmation that Britain is an equal society, open to all.

For others this is a modernism too far, a move that threatens to tear the Conservative party apart.

One gay Tory, however, finds himself rather conflicted. Ivan Massow was the most famous, gay man in the Conservative party in the 1990s; “the only gay in the Westminster village”, as he described himself. Or certainly the only one openly so.

He claims, with some justification, that he was the architect of the Conservatives “detoxifying”, many years before David Cameron jumped on a husky sledge and hugged a hoodie.

Today, he will be at home, in east London, raising a muted soft drink if the bill goes through.

He would have liked to have been celebrating in Somerset and Frome, the constituency he hoped to represent at the next general election. But the local party turned him down. He has yet to receive an answer why he failed to even make the shortlist. A terse email this week merely informed him that the local Conservative Association did not intend to interview him.

This email arrived within days of Edmund Costelloe, the chairman of the local Association, resigning over Mr Cameron’s “Ill-thought-out attack on marriage between a man and woman for the procreation of children”, added he was “outraged by this attack on natural and historic family values.”

Massow refuses to state publicly if he thinks the two events are connected. Conservative sources say it is “totally absurd” to suggest Massow’s sexuality or position on gay marriage played a part. But it seems an odd coincidence that they happened within days of each other.

What is certain is that Massow’s failure to even be considered in the constituency, on the edge of the Mendip Hills, encapsulates the deep gulf between the modernisers at Westminster and those in the shire heartlands, who fail to understand why David Cameron is so keen to push the controversial legislation through.

Any opposition to gay marriage, reckons Massow, is rank prejudice. “The only reason can be pure homophobia. We’ve got to put it behind us. The same sort of problems happened when we wanted women to be vicars. Now they’re brilliant vicars but they can’t be bishops.”

I tell him that I know some gays who just are not that fussed about the issue. Marriage, to them, is meaningless, especially as the Church of England has been given a “quadruple lock” ensuring that no vicar will ever be forced into marrying a gay couple.

For Massow that doesn’t matter. “Equality” is the one word reason that sums up why he feels so strongly about it. “We’re so nearly there. The finish line is just ahead of us.”

But is it really worth potentially splitting the party? “Those same shire people didn’t agree that a man and a man should live together. They are always one step behind the curve unfortunately. But there aren’t many more reforms for them to tolerate. There’s just nothing left after this. When we can get this last thing through the gate I can’t see anything else, any other slights on their lifestyle or their beliefs that they have to tolerate.”

He is a “fan” of David Cameron, thinks he can win outright in 2015, and reckons any potential backbench revolt is “nonsense”. But his admiration for the prime minister is tinged with profound disappointment. “I’m just sorry I can’t be part of it all, I can’t play my role as an MP or do anything because I’m one of the people who made the fuss.”

To understand this disappointment, one needs to wind the clock back two decades, to when Ivan Massow with one O-level to his name, and living in squat in Kentish Town, set up a financial services company aimed at gay clients. This was a controversial, but extremely clever, idea. Many were being refused insurance because they were HIV positive. Undoubtedly good looking, Massow posed in his own adverts, embracing his boyfriend, and the money flowed. The company ended up being worth an estimated £20 million, before it crashed ignominiously after it was sold.

He was a self-confessed “Thatcher’s child”, a position that earned him nothing but the opprobrium of most in the gay community, who thought it impossible to be both gay and tory. But he was lapped up by a few in Tory Central Office, and became a key adviser to William Hague.

After Jeffrey Archer was convicted for perjury he was briefly lined up to run as London Mayor (before Steve Norris became the official candidate), and was the official escort of Margaret Thatcher at the 1999 Conservative Party Conference. A fox-hunting, churchgoing, modern art-collecting, Tory moderniser – a bundle of contradictions.

He remains that to this day. We are chatting in his large, beautiful but ramshackle house (toothbrush in the kitchen sink) in Hoxton, a part of London full of trendy coffee shops and art galleries. A parrot called Hercules disconcertingly laughs intermittently while we speak.

The walls are covered in portraits of Massow himself, some of them nudes. He then winces when I tell him a photographer will be arriving soon. “Oh, I hate having my picture taken.”

But, you’ve got all these self-portraits, I laugh. “They are ironic,” he says.

Massow says he never needs to work again. Since the collapse of his first company over a decade ago, he went on to set up a social networking site for gay people called Jake, and is involved in various financial services companies, along with being the major investor in a line of Joan Collins wigs. She is an old friend. “There will be contemporary styles as well. I realise not everyone wants to look like Joan Collins.”

But these projects are small distractions for him, from what he would most like to be doing: politics. He was once a flatmate with Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, and Nick Bowles, the gay junior minister. He feels hurt that while there is now a cadre of gay MPs in government – most of whom were never out in the 1990s – he has not even made it onto a PPC shortlist.

I suggest that it is not homophobia that has barred his progress, but his knack of generating controversial headlines. After all, he briefly defected to the Labour Party in 2000 to highlight William Hague’s opposition to repealing Section 28, which banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools.

“It’s just a way to promote issues I am passionate about. That’s what I do. I look back and am quite proud at the changes that have occurred; I am sure I played a role in them. I don’t know if these changes would have occurred if someone like me hadn’t pushed them forward. “

He is probably right. But the one thing he has failed to push forward successfully is Ivan Massow.